A Students’ Guide for Writing an Academic Thesis Statement

1. The Hierarchy of Development of Academic Writing:

When developing an idea for drafting an Academic writing, you need to follow a series of hierarchical steps (i.e. each one is dependent on the completion of the previous). You always start by choosing a topic or thinking about an issue, something very general that you want to address a small aspect of it. While you start reading about the issue from a previous scholarship, you form a research question or find a knowledge gap based on what you are reading. This knowledge gap, which itself is a form of an implied question of how this part of the issue can be addressed, or that question formed in your mind, mixed with your continuous study of the previous research leads you to an “informed guess”; if you can test it (through experiment) your informed guess is called a hypothesis, if your subject matter is not within an experimental field, it is a provisional thesis. In any case, this initial answer to the question in the form of an informed guess, shall be modified with more reading of previous knowledge until you feel confident that it specifically addresses a particular and focused knowledge gap and it is an original and defendable possible answer to the question.

After you feel confident about your Hypothesis or thesis, you should write it in the form of a “Thesis Statement” or for some rare disciplines as part of the “Research Purpose”. This is the main focus of here and is explained further in parts 2 and 3. However, before getting into it, we should quickly talk about “arguments”. As mentioned, your “guess answer to the research question” should be defendable, either through scientific experimentation (which is when we have a Hypothesis) or formal or evidential argumentation (which is when we have a Provisional Thesis). Natural and applied sciences mostly deal with Empirical arguments, while Social and Cultural sciences mostly use evidential arguments, And Logical and Human Sciences majorly rely on reasoning or formal arguments.

2. Thesis/Hypothesis/Thesis Statement:

1. Hypothesis: As mentioned, this is a form of “informed guess” that can be (in any manner) tested and confirmed as valid.
2. Thesis: This is a surmised answer to your question or a claimed way to fill the knowledge gap which can be defended through formal or evidential arguments.
3. Thesis Statement: It is important to understand that Thesis and Hypothesis are both ideas in your head, and they might be very strong, but writing them down in a way that makes sense as strongly for a reader is an art in and of itself. The Thesis Statement – as the name suggests – is one (or at most two) sentences that encapsulate what the claim is, how it is relevant and strong, and why it is defendable and important. It always comes in the introduction of a paper (or introductory paragraph of an essay) and it is more about “how convincingly convey ideas to an educated reader with limited background knowledge of the field” than about all the small details of the ideas themselves.

3. The 3-Elements Model (3Cs):

If you look up “how to write a thesis statement” you find an endless number of different guidelines and methods, most of which provide a fairly similar end result with minor differences. The model I developed myself and I want to introduce here, is what I call the 3Cs Model which has three elements, always in the same order:

Thesis Statement: Context + Claim + Consequences

Context, as the name suggests, is providing the reader with a review of the general topic, field, and the more specific question in a short phrase:

By using the modern concept of Psychological Resilience from Western psychology for comparing poems written by a British Romanticist (William Wordsworth) and a Persian Imagist (Sohrab Sepehri), from the 19th and the early 20th centuries, respectively, …

Claim is that “informed guess” or “specific and original idea” which is focused and defendable through one or more forms of argumentation and usually completes the previous phrase in a way that the reader can understand your main point (thesis/hypothesis). Do not confuse providing your key points and main arguments or a mention of your issue (both defined in Part 1) as the main thesis or claim. Remember that the claim should be original and novel (not necessarily ground-breaking, but it should be your claim!) and also focused and specific (your issue is broad not specific, your arguments are scattered not focused). The issue belongs to the context element and the arguments to the consequence element of your statement.

… I argue that nature can be considered an important source of regaining this human capability and its role is not culture-dependent, …

Consequence itself can be either or both of two things: the significance of the claim (for the targeted reader, not for the researcher) and/or a list of arguments that will be provided later to defend and confirm the claim. It is said that any thesis/hypothesis should pass the “So What?” test; it means if after stating your claim your reader immediately thinks “okay, so what?!?” you must have an immediate answer to that, and what I formulated as “Consequence” of a thesis statement is essentially the answer to that “So What?” question. It is up to the researcher to choose which aspect of consequence (Significance or What is being argued) is more important or more suitable to be included in the thesis statement; if the statement is not already too long, one may consider creatively mixing both. The consequence, just like the context, is what makes the claim more tangible for the reader and strengthens the statement by making it pass the “so what?” test.

… this not only establishes this new psychological idea as a much older human experience and poetry as a vessel for expressing or even developing it, but also establishes that regardless of the socio-cultural circumstances, psychologists can turn towards “nature” for developing resilience training practices.

4. First Person vs. Third Person:

While the old obsession about third-person writing is going away in most disciplines, as researchers are realising that the role of the researcher/observer/analyser always affects the results, some disciplines still insist on it. As a rule of thumb, in natural science, and wherever theories are treated as “facts”, third-person writing is more common since it gives a non-personal sense to the writing. Contrastingly, in humanities and wherever theories are treated as “well-argued ideas”, first-person is more common, as it shows the “positionality” of the thinker in the process of argumentation, and does not even imply that the information is undebatable facts. This does not change the rules of writing a good thesis statement, but just changes a few words. For example, the thesis provided above in the first-person vioce can be written for third-person very easily as:

By using the modern concept of Psychological Resilience from Western psychology for comparing poems written by a British Romanticist (William Wordsworth) and a Persian Imagist (Sohrab Sepehri), from the 19th and the early 20th centuries, respectively, this study is trying to demonstrate that nature can be considered an important source of regaining this mental capability and its effects are not culture-dependent. This establishes this new psychological theory as an old human experience, poetry as a vessel for expressing or developing it, and suggests that in different socio-cultural situation, psychologists can turn towards “nature” for developing resilience training practices.